Last fall, My Beautiful Wife (henceforth known in this blog as MBW) and her sister took a vacation without me, to a place I love going. I was not happy about this fact. I told my family that I was going to chronicle the downward spiral of the week without MBW, and these are the stream of consciousness fever dreams that came from that five-day period. This series is also what gave a couple people the idea that I should continue writing! So thanks to K, T, and Mom for your encouragement! I wouldn't be up here, accepting this award without your unconditional love and support! *sniff* I promised I wouldn't cry...
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Day 1 of bachelor captivity:
I have lost the will to use the toilet separately... I now pee exclusively in the shower. On a related note, I no longer shower, as the tub is inhospitable. I believe the next to go will be written language. As the week progresses, I will be experimenting with communicating only with guttural grunts and an insulting, made-up sign language that involves waving a single finger in various condescending ways...
Day 2 of bachelor captivity:
I just ate something unidentifiable from the back of the fridge. I woke up this morning with the cruel sunlight beating down on my sweat-soaked sheets, thinking that maybe the nachos-and-cheese binge at 3am previous might have been ill advised. A shame no one was around to tell me that this was not a smart plan.
I am currently wandering the stacks at the local Home Depot, lost and mewling pitifully. Strangers slow down as they approach, but cautiously edge around me as I beg for help from everyone I see to lead me to the sink repair supplies. I wipe away my freely-running nose and decide that the only way to get an employee's (ARE there employees? I swear I saw someone in an orange smock as I entered this cattle corral) attention is to start climbing the shelves, monkey-style. This approach does not yield the results I expected, so in the grand monkey tradition, I start to throw my own dung at passerby. This brings management out rather quickly. It also brings about my quick ejection from the premises and several nasty bruises, no richer in the sink-stopper department than I was prior to my doomed excursion...
Day 3 of bachelor captivity:
I have ceased breathing through my nose. I was on the couch in my underwear earlier in a heap that can only be described as "awkwardly revealing", and realized that breathing through my nose is simply too much effort. I have been testing an obscure type of Kung fu that is aptly named "Gaping Maw" style, and have discover that I am lethally efficient in this technique. It requires extreme focus, staggering endurance, and the ability to inhabit a corner couch for so long that your limbs become actually fused to the fabric, making it more difficult to raise chip and dip to mouth. Gaping Maw's basic tenets involve marathon chip consumption sessions, mouth breathing, and convincing the easily-creeped-out girl who works at the pharmacy to hand-deliver the antibiotics necessary to counteract the compounding infections spreading from my exposed uvula. I haven't closed my mouth for fourteen hours. The steady stream of snack food occasionally shoos away the horseflies that seem to have found a new perch on my exposed tongue, but I may have to seriously consider getting the proper gear for this new hobby.
Can't... quite... reach... the remote... *WHEEEEZE*
Day 4 of bachelor captivity:
Navels are fascinating. I am not kidding. It seems like the study of navels should have an official name... "navelology"... "navelmetrics"... Somebody help me out here...
I was just watching two ants from what must be battling neighbor colonies (those queens and their drama) fighting over a very large crumb, and after a while, it became embarrassingly clear that their hearts were just not in it. You can only gnash your pincers and menacingly swoop your antennae a certain amount of times before it is obvious that you aren't really going to follow through on your pheromonal threats, and the two of you should maybe think about what you have in common, and go get a beer (or the ant colony equivalent) and talk about how Queens be crazy... A drone bromance.
My teeth hurt. Like, at a "deep down in the gums" level. These Sour Patch Kids bags do not come with any warning about consuming more than one club-pack bag in a sitting, though, so I am going to keep on tossing them in and puckering, 'cause there is no one here to tell me different. I think the Kids have dug a hole in my tongue. Right down to China.
Can beef jerky ever REALLY go bad? I know that bag was purchased on a road trip two years ago, but I can't take my eyes off of it...
Day 5 of Bachelor captivity:
You have to believe me, I had no idea that events would spiral so far out of control. Regardless of my intentions, however, the seemingly benign series of incidents that happened directly after I got out of bed in the early afternoon that day led to tragedy, and here is why:
I was left alone with a schnauzer.
The pooch in question appeared in my bedroom around 1:45 in the afternoon and stuck his wet nose in a rather uncomfortable place, causing my startled girlish squeal. I am going to choose to believe that he could not have known the suggestive nature of his chosen area of attack. Immediately following this unfortunate interruption of a Cheetos-induced fever dream, two things happened; a South American security guard of 55 years of age was shot and killed in his home in Bogota, Colombia, and the small, puckish schnauzer in question grabbed a hold of my ankle with his teeth and would not let go. Make no mistake; I do not now, nor have I ever owned a dog, much less a plucky schnauzer whose eyes betrayed an adventurous yet lonely existence, and who abruptly and with great satisfaction dropped a "present" on my duvet.
How was I to know that the schnauzer (whom I would later come to know as Pablito) was on the run from the cartel where his master had used him to sniff out car bombs and C4? How could I have known that his collar contained a micro-SD card with 14 GBs of inside information that the Cartel would kill the population of a small country to have back? How Pablito ever found the wherewithal to sneak on board the cargo plane, stow away until he reached these shores, evade airport staff, and wander into my neighborhood I will never know, but I know this: if he had not waddled into my life on that fateful day (possibly gaining entrance through the back door that I had opened to facilitate my urinating on the lawn around 2am), I would not be the man I am today...
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And that's all for my first "creative writing" experiment since high school! Oh, and I said last time that I would post about what I am listening to, so here it is:
Artist: Sandra McCracken
Album: Desire Like Dynamite
Sandra is married to Derek Webb, another amazing musician, but is her own woman stylistically, despite some natural collaboration with her husband. This album is at times boisterous, melancholy, uplifting, and haunting, and is able to sound nothing like her older work, but still fit like it belongs in her catalog. She grows and changes it up on every album, with increasingly rewarding results!
Talk again soon,
Jared
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